Category: Swedish Grace

…like it or not

That ice hockey rink sized, shiny diamond dream. I just realized that, before social media, we never had it in Sweden…

While reading all the jewelry material (my big interest) I do, here on Substack and especially what is written about natural versus lab-grown diamonds (I am not a fan of the latter), I have become more and more aware of how much the “big diamond dream” is an American thing.

When it comes to diamonds, why always this [American] obsession with size? Never clarity or color och cut. (I mean I will go to my grave, to protect the opinion that nothing EVER beats an Asscher cut.)
And what is wrong with a plain gold, silver or platinum wedding band with no stones attached? More generally, what is with the fixation on diamonds? What happened to the discussion about all those wonderful colored gemstones? (CartierTutti-Frutti, anyone?)

Taylor and her BIG Krupp.

Swedish candy

In the late 1990s, diamonds started to sneak into Swedish – and, I think it’s fair to say, Nordic – engagement and wedding rings, but they were/are rarely larger than about 0,25–0,30 carats. The economic conditions and financial reality in the Nordic countries has never encouraged or allowed for the purchase of large natural diamonds and it still does not. (After all, only a two of of us are Erling Braut Haaland or Daniel Ek, you know.)

I had NEVER known someone with a one-carat diamond and did not even see one in real life until I first came to America. (Behind glass counters, walking through the engagement ring department at Tiffany’s. Go figure.)

People in the Nordic countries, in general, may save for years to pay for a wedding, but traditionally they have not/do not spent/d a disproportionate amount of that budget on a [over romantized and commercialized] ring. I guess, simplicity has long been part of our Nordic design and culture and that has – together with financial means – naturally extended to jewelry as well. A plain wedding band – or a with a kinda tiny, modest diamond – has historically been seen as perfectly sufficient.

The marketing scheme

It is also worth to remember that the modern dream about the perfect [HUGE] diamond is not an ancient tradition. It is through the years, to a remarkable degree, very much a commercialized concept hatched by the successful marketing departments at the major jewelry companies and the result of one of the most successful marketing campaigns ever created.
Throughout the twentieth century, the diamond industry – most famously through De Beers’ “A Diamond Is Forever” campaign launched in 1947 by copywriter Frances Gerety for the advertising agency N.W. Ayer & Son – managed to transform diamonds from a luxury purchased by relatively few into the expected symbol of engagement and e t e r n a l love. Over the decades, advertising also helped normalize ideas such as spending months of salary on a ring (how many movies have not had the arch with the boy saving up to buy a ring for the girl he l o v e s…) and equating a bigger diamond with a deeper commitment.

Those campaigns saturated and soaked American magazines, newspapers, Hollywood films and later television. Ads, that fortunately never reached the Nordic shores because consumer culture and marketing evolved differently. One example on why the “diamond dream” ads never had quite the same cultural reach in the Nordic countries is that commercial television arrived much later – in Sweden we got TV commercials first thorough cable that nobody actually had in 1987/88 and then “for real” in 1991. The result is that what many Americans consider a “timeless tradition” often looks, from a Nordic perspective, like a remarkably successful piece of twentieth-century marketing.

So, sorry to be a party pooper, but:

Go natural, go small – or go home.

Photos are picked up online if nothing else is stated.

©SlowClapStories

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